Recent Questions with Answers
last updated December 5, 1993
Suggestion: You may want to use the Search command under
the File menu to quickly locate information in this document.
This document contains answers to questions regarding
How do I download an image or sound to my machine, rather than viewing or hearing it?
After selecting Load to Local Disk (formerly Binary Transfer
Mode) using the Options menu, clicking the mouse button on a
hyperlink causes Mosaic to prompt you for a local file save, regardless of the
document's file type.
To tell Mosaic that a particular file type should always be written to
a file, set its viewer to mosaic-internal-dump with a mailcap file.
Why don't WAIS URL's work?
NCSA Mosaic now offers native wais support, see here
for more details (especially the section on Mosaic, WAIS, and Gateways).
Why can't I view .rgb images?
Mosaic may report an error if you access a link that points to an .rgb format
image, meaning xv3.0 is not being used. Since xv3.0 is now available and can
view .rgb files, all you need to do is download xv3.0 from export.lcs.mit.edu/contrib and
compile it.
I can't view a file in format BLARGH via NCSA Mosaic!
See the answer to the question Why
don't my multimedia X resources work anymore?
How do I access an ftp site that is missing from Mosaic's list?
To enter an ftp site directly, select Open from the File menu and enter the URL in the text field, for example:
ftp://siggraph.org/
Alternatively, you could use this form-based service.
How do I search?
To search the current document for a text string, choose Find In
Current (formerly Search) from the File menu.
Other than that, you will only be able to perform a search if the document
you are viewing is attached to a searchable index.
If you are running Mosaic with Motif 1.2 or under HP/UX and are having
problems with text entry fields (such as those for search keywords), more
information is available here.
Even though I'm on an SGI (or a Sun, or an HP), the Audio Annotate
menubar entry is greyed out. Why?
Because you don't have /usr/sbin/recordaiff (for SGI) or
/usr/demo/SOUND/record (for Sun) or
/usr/audio/bin/srecorder (for HP) in place; more
information is here.
I can pull down group listings from my news servers but not
any actual articles!
Your NNTP server apparently doesn't like to return articles named by
message ID -- it will only return articles identified by group and
article number. This is very bad, as the URL scheme Mosaic uses can
only identify news articles by message ID. Your NNTP server is in
violation of the NNTP spec (RFC 977)
and should be investigated by your news administrator. (If your admin
declares your NNTP server to be properly working, then feel free to
send us a bug report, but we'll need read access to your NNTP server
to do anything at that point.)
Viewers that run in the background, such as igif, do not work!
This problem usually occurrs on SGIs, where GL programs fork into background
processes on startup, by default. To use igif as your gif viewer,
simply use the -f flag, by inserting the following line in your mailcap
file:
image/gif; igif -f %s
Here is more information on mapping MIME types to
external viewers.
Is there a news group or mailing list discussing Mosaic?
Currently,
the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www and the mailing list
www-talk@info.cern.ch.
Here is more info on World Wide Web
Where can I find Mosaic for a particular system?
The binaries are on
NCSA's ftp server, ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, in the directory /Mosaic/Mosaic-binaries.
Select the .message file for further information.
Here is information on using Mosaic on other,
unsupported systems.
What software (image viewers, sound players, etc.) do I need to support
Mosaic?
See the FAQ document,
Other Mosaic/WWW Software, under NCSA Mosaic Multimedia Resources.
How do I edit hypertext? (or) Is there an HTML text editor?
See the FAQ document,
Other Mosaic/WWW Software, under HTML Converters and Editors
How do I set up a server? (or) How do I provide information to the
Web?
The first-order solution is to simply place the documents you wish to serve on
an anonymous ftp server and serve them that way. The corresponding URL would
be
file://machine.name/directory/filename
The advanced solution, for greater performance and flexibility, is to set up
an HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server. There are several available;
NCSA distributes a public-domain server, at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic/ncsa_httpd, with
full online
documentation.
The document you'll find most useful in creating your own HTML documents is
the Help on
HTML document in Mosaic's pull-down help menu.
How do I create the postage stamp images commonly used as hyperlinks to larger images?
The utility xv3.0, used for displaying images, also crops, expands, etc. You can download xv3.0 from
export.lcs.mit.edu/contrib and compile it.
Can a Mosaic hotlink run an external application?
Yes, see this
document on executing shell scripts inside Mosaic.
Can I put a hypertext link in an annotation?
Yes and no. Since the Annotate menu uses a normal, everyday Motif
text widget for entering and editing annotations, there's no fancy
hypertext editing capability -- yet.
However, if you understand HTML, you
can freely use anchors in your annotation text (since NCSA Mosaic
displays annotations as preformatted text, using the
<pre> tag, which recognizes anchors). You may want to
begin your annotation with the </pre> tag.
Why do you use a layer of indirection for audio annotations? Why
not just have the annotation hyperlink point directly at the audio
file?
Because then there'd be no way for you to subsequently delete the
annotation, using the current scheme of things.
After installing the CERN HTTP daemon, inlined images do not appear:
The CERN HTTP daemon continues to corrupt images and other forms of
binary data. The easiest thing to do is to use the NCSA HTTP
daemon instead (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in /Mosaic/ncsa_httpd; binaries and
source are available), as it will always pass through data unchanged
and your images will show up correctly.
